We received a note from Ania Banaszek from Netguru a Polish Rails consultancy who’s organizing the Ruby Open Source Challenge which started on July 1st. It’s basically a month long bounty to help improve open source projects. This first edition is dedicated to Active Admin, a very popular solution for easy Rails backends. They're letting the community and the leader of the project draw winners and offer them goodies like an iPad, screencasts like Peepcode and Railscasts, tickets to Ruby conferences, etc.

Seedbank by James McCarthy gives you a convention for splitting off seeds into multiple files, it allows you to have seeds for different environments, and it gives you some additional rake tasks so you can load just one seed file if you need it.

Seed Fu is a gem that hit version 2.2 a few months back. It can create seed data with constraints. If the constraints you determine are met, it will update matching records. You can also make sure that an existing record will not be updated after it’s initially created by using the seed_once method. And just like Seedbank it comes with selective rake tasks.

Arjan van der Gaag wrote up a great tips and tricks blog post going over some best practices for Factory Girl. Traits, ignored attributes, aliases, setting up common associations, and a couple of things not to do.

WhowishWord from Tanin Na Nakorn Tanun Niyomjit allows you to edit your translations from within your Rails views through a WYSIWYG editor. The gem allows you to use the same t method you should be familiar with if you’ve ever used the rails-i18n API.